Legal Prospects of Public-Private Partnerships for Housing Delivery in Nigeria

This paper overviews the housing deficit situation in Nigeria and the concerted efforts of the public sector along with the private sector proponent to secure adequate housing provision over the years without the achievement commensurate success as housing continues to remain scarce in the face of growing population which in turn continues to drive the urbanization indices higher. Evidently, the global contemporary innovation, known as Public-Private Partnership (PPP) which is a procurement model that entails a long term contract between the public sector and the private sector for joint development, financing, operation and management of infrastructure provision and social services has become a veritable tool to achieving housing provision among such other social needs across the world and the viability of which is seen in the successes recorded in countries like the UK, China, Singapore, South Africa etc as shown in the study; away from the conventional models of contracting for housing development by the public sector. However, this study is limited to a conscientization of the prospects of the application of PPP in the Nigerian housing delivery as has been done in other countries of the world with optimal success seeing that the same notion of the PPP has continued to present less than optimum result in Nigeria. This study is an analysis of the model from the practice in those countries where they have recorded effective housing provision in order to apply the critical success factors against the failure factors in the Nigerian application of the same model. Imperatively the lack of clearly defined objective for the projects, want of adequate alignment of the objectives with the stakeholders, absence of clear regulatory and policy framework coupled with weak institutional frameworks, monitoring deficiency, corrupt tendencies of the players in the face of the lack of deliberate incentives to cushion the inflation are among such factors that this study has found out can be reversed to bring about the successful implementation of PPP in the housing delivery value chain in Nigeria.